


black & white

by spicyjarvis



Series: the ineffable idiots [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Actually they're assholes all the time, Angel/Demon Relationship, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, But so am I so who's surprised, Crowley Whump, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Holy Water, Hurt Crowley, I just really like hurting Crowley okay, I promise I love him, I use capital letters in the story, I'm Sorry, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), It's kind of gay, Just not in the summary or the title, LMAO, M/M, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Soft Aziraphale (Good Omens), Sometimes humans are fucking assholes, Torture, no beta we die like men, sage - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 04:02:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19349104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyjarvis/pseuds/spicyjarvis
Summary: it isn’t unusual for crowley to disappear for a bit and so aziraphale doesn’t feel any concern when he doesn’t answer his phone. the angel supposes that his demon partner is probably off somewhere causing chaos, or perhaps he’s gone back downstairs for a couple hours to run some errands or… whatever it is they do down there.he does feel concern, however, when crowley bowls into the bookshop exactly thirty-three minutes before it is due to close and immediately collapses, lifeless, onto the ground into the middle of the room.





	black & white

**Author's Note:**

> this is for you, evie!  
> this is my first time writing good omens so i apologise if i wrote them ooc or anything.

 

 

 

There’s a good reason that explains why Aziraphale doesn’t let Crowley dive headfirst into the snow shovelled into tempting, fluffy piles of white at the side of the street outside of his apartment building - demons are not creatures built for the cold. It seeps through them down to the bone and leaves them vulnerable. Not so much as to kill them if they are exposed in moderation, but enough to significantly weaken them against any attacking force.

 

So when Crowley comes to and becomes immediately aware of the bitter chill plaguing the room, he’s a little fucking pissed off about it. His limbs feel heavy and there’s a dull ache present in the back of his skull. He technically has no biological need to breathe as a demon, but he feels like he has to what with the unidentifiable weight clogging up his chest.

 

It’s as he tries to reach up to scratch his nose that he realises he’s bound to the uncomfortable chair he’s sitting on with chains, and finally the fact that something isn’t right begins to dawn upon him.

 

He’s in the middle of a room he doesn’t remember entering. The walls are grey and the floor is concrete. There’s nothing else in here with him save for the hanging light above his head with a bright, ugly glare that reminds him way too much of Hell. For a moment, he ponders the possibility that he’s been kidnapped and taken downstairs, but he doesn’t pick up any sort of demonic energy around him other than what he himself radiates.

 

“Is anybody here?” he calls into the empty space.

 

There’s no answer. 

 

He doesn’t know what he expected.

 

“This is not how I thought I’d be spending my day,” he mutters to no one in particular and strains forward to look down at his feet. They’re chained to the legs of the chair - but he brushes past that detail upon noticing the circle painted on the floor around him.

 

He doesn’t feel a lot of anxiety as a demon, but he allows himself the smallest fraction of dread when he observes that the circle is, in fact, a perfectly drawn devil’s trap - whoever has held him hostage here appears to know what they’re doing.

 

An hour passes and Crowley is beginning to get bored. That ever-present exhaustion from the cold starts to weigh down his eyelids. It’s one thing to wake up, trapped and cold, but it’s another to be left there long enough for him to wish that something would actually fucking happen.

 

Another hour sees Crowley dozing, head tipped forward onto his chest, fingers hanging loosely behind the back of the chair.

 

A door slams behind him and it’s enough to jar the demon awake once more. “My, my,” a voice he doesn’t recognise purrs, “sleeping where you sit, are we?”

 

“You _did_ leave me here in an empty room,” Crowley says passively. “I was bound to get bored at some point or another.”

 

Someone steps into view. A young gentleman perhaps in his early thirties, with dark hair and trimmed facial hair. They look, in no way, like an expert on the topic of demons - but Crowley notices the way he keeps well away from the devil’s trap and can smell the Holy objects he’s got tucked away in his shoulder bag even from here and decidedly concludes that he’s getting something right.

 

It’s a little too late to try and convince this man that he isn’t actually a demon, as he usually would do. So, in a weak attempt to get on the man’s good side, Crowley comments, “you’re a handsome one, aye?”

 

“Don’t try that with me, demon!” The man practically spits out the word. “I know your kind. I know what you do. I know how evil you are.”

 

“I don’t know what you expected from a demon,” Crowley says.

 

“I want to save that man you’re possessing,” he snaps. “I just want to save him and send you back to where you come from. He- he has a family waiting for him!”

 

Crowley cackles. “Oh, I assure you, he doesn’t.”

 

The man makes a horrified face and Crowley has to suck in a deep breath to try and suppress the peels of laughter that threatens the cool, collected demeanour he’s aiming for. “You- you killed them, didn’t you?” he demands. “You possessed this man and you used his hands to kill every person he loves. Didn’t you? Didn’t you, demon?”

 

“I’m not possessing anyone,” Crowley tries. “This is my body. It’s pretty fantastic, isn’t it?”

 

“Shut up! You’re lying to me,” the man growls. “That’s all you demons do. You lie.”

 

“We cause traffic jams sometimes.”

 

There is no response. Instead, the man casts him a final glare (he’s frightened, but he’s refusing to show it - Crowley can feel it radiating from him like heat from a fire) and digs into his shoulder bag to produce a small snippet of something small, leafy and green. “Oh, fuck you,” the demon sighs out.

 

Much like the cold, the presence of sage in moderation will not kill a demon. Crowley thinks of it more as an irritant - the smoke produced from setting it alight upsets his throats, lungs and eyes and could probably suffocate him if enough is burned. Drinking a mug of sage tea might do the trick if you wanted to murder one slowly and painfully (if you manage to convince them to do it in the first place, that is, because every demon knows perfectly well what sage is).

 

“You know what this is?” the man says.

 

“Sage,” Crowley supplies casually.

 

“It’s sage!”

 

“I _just_ said that.”

 

The man pulls out a milky white candle and a lighter from his shoulder bag. “I don’t want to have to use any means of force on you, but I can tell you won’t give up that body quickly, demon,” he says as he lights the candle and holds the sage over it as if to threaten him. “If you leave now, I won’t do this. I’ll let you go free.”

 

“Do I have to say it again? This is-”

 

He drops the sage into the candle’s innocent flame. Crowley sits and watches the leaf’s edges quickly turn black and curl up, watches it’s stream of pale grey smoke float lazily into the air. His kidnapper drops the smoking herb into the devil’s trap and he can feel it immediately as he inhales - feels that burn in the back of his throat, feels it stab the lining of his lungs, feels it burning in his eyes.

 

Crowley coughs. “This- this is my body,” he says raspily. “How many times do I have to tell you that before you finally register it in your tiny fucking peabrain?”

 

The man, still stooped on the ground a little way away, takes another piece of sage, sets it atop the candlelight and then drops it beside the first snippet inside of the devil’s trap. “You’re lying to me, demon. Stop lying to me!” he snaps.

 

When Crowley coughs again, his throat feels bloody. He glowers at him through watering, stinging eyes. There was no convincing this man to let him go free - he believes nothing Crowley tries to tell him (he supposes that demons _do_ lie a lot, but now is _not_ the time) and there’s no easy way to get out of the devil’s trap even if he does work through the chains. He wonders whether or not Aziraphale will conveniently realise something isn’t right and appear to rescue him, but that isn’t how it works. That isn’t how any of it works.

 

The man stands to watch Crowley choke on his own breath and the demon just wants him to hurry the fuck up with whatever he’s got planned. He can barely get it out as most of the oxygen in the air within the trap is gradually replaced with the sage smoke, but he manages to choke out, “not all demons live on Earth by possessing a human, you fucking cretin.”

 

“Shut the fuck up, demon!”

 

It seems that the question was the man’s tipping point because he delves again into his bag and pulls out a water bottle that stinks of divine energy, but it’s nothing too strong - it isn’t pure. “It’s diluted,” he tells Crowley, “There is only a couple of drops in here. I don’t want to hurt the body you’re possessing too much. I just want to draw you out of there.”

 

Crowley wrinkles his nose, but ultimately says nothing.

 

“You won’t say anything? You have no protests?”

 

“Of course I fucking have protestssss!” Crowley bursts out, pulling violently (and a little desperately) against the chains that bind him. “But you won’t listen to a word I’m ssssaying and- and I’m trapped in this fucking trap- and-”

 

As he’s coughing out his answer, the man dips two fingers into the bottle, strolls behind him to where his hands are and flicks a couple drops onto Crowley’s bare skin. It jars the demon as he registers the sensation of melting and bubbling and nearly unbearable, bone-grinding pain. He inhales sharply and nearly pitches forwards in his chair.

 

“What the shit,” he breathes out through gritted teeth. “That hurt! That fucking hurt! You- you little bitch!”

 

His captor has the nerve to laugh at him. “You still don’t want to come out, huh? I have more of this stuff, you know, and it isn’t all as diluted as this is.”

 

“You call _that_ diluted?” Crowley bites out. There is definitely more than ‘a couple of drops’ of Holy water in there. The normal water to Holy water ratio is all wrong. He pulls again and again against the chains but he sees no point - as long as this devil’s trap is still in place, the chains and the chair are the least of his problems. He’s never wished for Aziraphale to spontaneously appear before him as much as he does now.

 

Sweet, harmless Aziraphale.

 

The man sets the water bottle onto the ground and Crowley metaphorically breathes out, hoping that it signifies the end of this entire thing. It hasn’t been so bad as of yet, but he’s not dumb enough to know that it could get way, way worse.

 

The burns on his hands radiate hot pain where the Holy water mixture remains under his skin but it’s getting better as each minute passes - Crowley isn’t sure whether it’s because the wound is healing or whether it’s because he’s accustomed to the dull presence of pain like this. He doesn’t care right now. All he cares about is getting out of here.

 

The fucking trap.

 

“So when’d you get so good at drawing these circles?” he asks into the silence, cautiously watching the man’s back as he pulls something else out of his shoulder bag. “It’s very effective. I don’t have to even try and get out of it to know that it works.”

 

His captor spins around and unloads a bullet into his right shoulder.

 

Crowley cries out, shocked, aching and sick to the stomach.

 

The man had _shot_ him. He’d _shot_ him! With a fucking gun!

 

He finds himself shuddering at the sensation of blood seeping into his shirt and running in droplets down his arm and chest. The pain is nothing he hasn’t felt before - it isn’t any special sort of bullet, nothing Holy or blessed, and blood loss shouldn’t be an issue if he acts quickly - but it’s enough to send sickening waves of nausea over his body and he pitches forward to gag. 

 

The automatic inhale that follows up the aforementioned gag sucks more of the sage smoke into his system and when he’s over his wet coughing fit, he notices black blood splattered across his thighs and on the floor beside his bound feet. Shit. That’s bound to stain.

 

“I needed to get into your bloodstream without going inside of the circle,” the man says, and picks up the water bottle again. The anxious wobble in his voice doesn’t go unnoticed by Crowley and the demon can tell he’s frightened. Good. “I didn’t want to harm the body you’re possessing too much. I didn’t shoot any major arteries. I know I didn’t.”

 

“Why the fuck do you need to-”

 

Crowley spies the water bottle in his hands.

 

“Oh, shit.”

 

His kidnapper holds the water bottle over the bullet wound, but doesn’t tip any out yet. “If this doesn’t get you out, I don’t know what will.”

 

“Please reconsider,” Crowley croaks, straining desperately at the chains. There are not many times where a demon has had to beg for a _human_ to give him mercy and it is quite frankly humiliating. This won’t kill him, he knows, but he doesn’t doubt the amount of pain it’ll put him through and he has so many better things he could be doing than sitting in this windowless room, screaming.

 

“I’m sorry,” the man says, and he really does sound sorry.

 

The water bottle is emptied.

 

It’s everywhere. It’s fucking _everywhere_ and Crowley is screaming _._ It’s as if someone’s taken a bolt of lightning and pushed it through his veins, every tendril burning and burning and _burning_ like fierce, liquid fire, and for too many long, hideous minutes, all the demon can see is violent, blinding white.

 

He is no way new to pain like this, but it never gets better. Crowley realises this as he thrashes in the chair, straining at the chains around his ankles and wrists with raw, angry desperation, the pain pushing him close enough to the edge for him to start sobbing where he sits.

 

By now, the sage smoke is but a soft, loving stroke to his lungs. Nausea rolls over him in waves and he leans to the side to empty his stomach onto the floor. There’s nothing but yellow bile and black blood to throw up. It burns his throat.

 

“I’m sorry,” a voice says, but it’s barely a mumble over the throbbing in Crowley’s ears. “I’m sorry. I had to. I had to. I’m so sorry.”

 

With another wave of sickness in his throat and nothing left but the blood in his throat to throw up, Crowley dry heaves onto the floor. “Y-you…” he tries, but he can’t find it in him to finish what he wants to say. He feels exhausted. He’s in pain.

 

He misses Aziraphale.

 

 

 

.

 

 

 

When Crowley comes to, everything is sore.

 

He doesn’t remember passing out, but ultimately he’s glad he did. Instead of the burning sage, all he can smell is the sickening stench of singed skin and demon’s blood. It’s a scent he knows well, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant, especially when it’s coming from his own body.

 

“Shit,” he whispers. “Oh, shit.”

 

There’s no one in the room with him. There are his own bodily fluids all over the floor. And, when he leans over to spit out some blood that had collected in his mouth while he’d been passed out, he notices there’s a gap in the devil’s trap.

 

He doesn’t care how it happened. He doesn’t care whether it was an accident or whether the man who’d captured him had done it himself out of guilt or whatever before he’d skedaddled. All he cares about is the fact that he’s no longer trapped in this fucking circle and he can finally get out and see Aziraphale again. He can go _home._

 

He swallows the waves of pain that return to him as he shifts in favour of focusing on his escape. With no sociopathic wannabe exorcist around to distract him, Crowley finally manages to slip his wrists out of the chains after ten excruciating minutes of trying not to dislocate them and then stoops over to free his ankles. He stares emotionlessly at the black blood splattered up the concrete as he works.

 

It’s after he’s finally free that he realises it had actually been a splash of Holy water from that bastard bottle that had wiped away a section of the devil’s trap. It’s very much an unlikely possibility, but Crowley finds comfort in thinking that Aziraphale had something to do with that. He can allow himself that much after what he’d just been through.

 

It hurt - oh, Satan, how it hurt - to move but Crowley manages to find his way out of the room. It exists directly into a dark, dirty alleyway that he doesn’t recognise too well. A homeless man crouched beside a bin stops digging through the trash long enough to look up at him and call out, “are you okay, fella?”

 

The last thing Crowley wants to do is talk to anyone but his angel right now, but he sucks it up. “In which direction is A.Z Fell and Co?”

 

 

 

.

 

 

 

It isn’t unusual for Crowley to disappear for a bit and so Aziraphale doesn’t feel any concern when he doesn’t answer his phone. The angel supposes that his demon partner is probably off somewhere causing chaos, or perhaps he’s gone back downstairs for a couple of hours to run some errands or… whatever it is they do down there.

 

He does feel concern, however, when Crowley bowls into the bookshop exactly thirty-three minutes before it is due to close and immediately collapses, lifeless, onto the ground into the middle of the room.

 

Aziraphale pulls the curtains across the windows and locks the door to the shop before he crouches down beside the motionless figure of his partner. The demon looks sickeningly pale and there’s a lot of black blood soaked into his dark, tattered clothes. Blood loss and open wounds are not too worrying for a demonic being on their own - they have better healing qualities than a human does - but Aziraphale’s stomach drops into his toes as soon as he picks up the tell-tale scent of Holy water and a whiff of sage smoke within the wretched smell of blood and burned skin.

 

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale breathes out. “What did they do to you…?”

 

Crowley is barely conscious, but he manages to crack an eye open long enough to register Aziraphale’s presence at his side. “Zira…” he breathes out around a weak smile.

 

“You’re so cold,” the angel murmurs. Whoever did this to him must know have known their stuff - it isn’t common knowledge that demons are weakened in the cold. He clicks and the thermostat dials up, warming the room close to immediately. It makes Aziraphale sweaty and uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care about that right now. All he cares about is seeing his demon safe.

 

He brushes reddish hair back from the demon’s white forehead. He rubs his palms together, summoning some angelic healing to his hands. Heaven will definitely come down and give him trouble for using these abilities in order to save a demon of all creatures, but he doesn’t think about that. He doesn’t care. He just needs to focus on saving Crowley’s life.

 

It takes a couple of long, painful minutes, but Aziraphale manages to heal the smaller, more spaced out gashes on the back of his demon’s hands and a large amount of the wound on his shoulder. Getting the bullet out of his body took longer than he would have liked and he is eternally glad that Crowley was unconscious for it. 

 

The realisation that he was shot makes the angel feel sick to the stomach - and the fact that whoever did this to him had the nerve to pour Holy water into it afterwards even more so. What a disgusting thing to do to a living creature. It makes him feel uncharacteristically angry just thinking about the amount of stress and pain they’d put Crowley under.

 

What is left of the wound he cleans and protects with one of those large, square plasters he kept for human emergencies under the register. The demon’s skin isn’t looking so pale anymore. All he needs now is a lot of water and a lot of rest.

 

Ten minutes sees Aziraphale tucking his demon into their bed in the apartment above the bookshop. He’s out cold, and his chest rises and falls with the peaceful rhythm of unbothered sleep. Demonic and celestial beings don’t technically need to sleep in order to survive, but it’s an effective, human way to rest the mind, and Aziraphale reckons that if there’s any being that needs a nap right now, it’s Crowley.

 

He longs to know exactly what happened, exactly who did it, but he knows better than to pry as soon as Crowley is up and about again. If the extent of his wounds if anything to judge by, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. And it is no doubt going to be something that troubles his demon for a while longer after this day.

 

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale breathes, placing a glass of water on the bedside table and sitting on the bed beside his partner. “What did you get yourself into…?”

 

 

 

.

 

 

 

Crowley wakes up and expects to be sat in the same cold room, in the same cold chair, with the same cold chains binding him to it.

 

In reality, Crowley wakes up feeling pleasantly warm and in significantly less pain than beforehand. 

 

The body he feels nestled up close to his is so familiar and so welcomed that Crowley wants to start sobbing on the spot. There, in all of his angelic presence, is Aziraphale - his wonderful, perfect, beautiful angel. He’s dozing in the bed beside him, his eyebrows knitted towards each other with leftover worry and anxiety, white hair a soft, scruffy mess atop his head. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Crowley whispers into his sleeping face.

 

It must have been enough to wake him up because, just as he shifts his head to the other side and closes his eyes again, the arm lying across his stomach moves and Aziraphale is sleepily lifting his head to look at him. “Crowley?” he murmurs. “Are you awake?”

 

“... no.”

 

Aziraphale chuckles. “Are you feeling alright?”

 

At this, Crowley hesitates. He… he doesn’t know. He can’t tell. He knows he feels happy and content simply because he’s away from that room, because he’s lying in the comfortable warmth with his favourite angel on any realm, but there’s something inside of him that just doesn’t feel quite right. Something that makes him feel just a bit unsettled. It’s akin to an unscratchable itch.

 

“It’s quite alright,” the angel mumbles. “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to know that you are okay, dear.”

 

He rolls his head back over and Aziraphale is looking at him with those beautiful ocean-grey eyes of his, worry pressed into his expression. They stay like that for a couple of blissful seconds before Crowley presses a gentle, reassuring kiss to his forehead - he absolutely hates how soft this beautiful bastard of an angel makes him. “I’m always okay when I’m with you.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> comments would be sick
> 
> [my discord server](https://discord.gg/SgGFvDC)   
>  [my Tumblr blog](https://spicyjarvis.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [the sequel!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19818238)


End file.
